What Grandma Doris Teaches Us About Saying Goodbye

How Sparkle Valley explores grief, wonder, and the idea that meaning survives change.

As I wrap this up, I keep thinking about the ending of the trilogy and I come back to something else:

Isn’t all this really about saying goodbye?

Childhood, Abigail, Grandma Doris.

Abigail can't keep Emily's childhood. Just like Emily can't keep Grandma Doris. And yet both of them learn that meaning survives change. And then Grandma Doris leaves them with one more lesson. Not by saying anything specific, but by the way she leaves.

A blue butterfly appears at the very end

In the final scene she faces the unknown the same way that she faces everything else in Sparkle Valley and life, with wonder. Because she knows that there's another adventure ahead.

Remember, at the end of Book 3, when Emily wakes up in the nursing home? She's just returned from Sparkle Valley, and Grandma Doris is asleep in the bed. But she's also standing beside it. Young again. Whole.

She walks to the open window as the butterflies wait for her in the evening sky. And then she turns back to Emily one last time and says, "This is going to be quite the adventure."

Doris is facing the unknown here. She doesn't have any answers. None of us do. But she approaches that final horizon like she always does, with wonder.

Throughout the series, she's always looking beyond the next hill, around the next corner, toward the next adventure. She never lost her wonder. Even in her last moments. That’s another reason why the ending means a lot to me.

As you know by now, Sparkle Valley began with my daughter and all the time that we spent together in the garden. But Grandma Doris was inspired by my mother and my grandmother. My grandmother lived to be 107, and she literally embodied the wonder that I tried to capture in these books.

My mom, to use the words of Novalis, was the first poet of my life. She taught me to notice things. I talked about the paintings at the National Gallery earlier, but that's just one small recent example. Our childhood was filled with magic. She taught us to see the magic in ordinary places, even when I had no idea what she was doing (and she probably didn’t either). And without her, who knows if I would have recognized what was happening all those years later in the garden with my daughter. I might've just seen a patch of dirt and a few toys. But instead we saw a world there, my daughter and me. At the end of Book 3, I dedicated the trilogy to her and my grandmother. And that's why Grandma Doris feels so real to me. 

She had a beautiful way of seeing the world. That's what I hoped ultimately to pass on to my daughter through Sparkle Valley. The stories matter, of course, but now, looking back, I don't think that the books were the important part. As I already mentioned, the real work happened in the Magic Garden. It happened while we arranged sticks and rocks into vegetable gardens for imaginary creatures, or followed fairy boats beyond the bend in the stream. And then looked to the next one.

Ordinary places became magical because we decided to see them that way. My mother passed that way of seeing on to me. And now I hope I've passed that on to my daughter. Because that's how wonder survives. It's one person opening the door for another.

And now, let's bring the Blue Flower into the conversation one last time. Because there’s a connection here. The Blue Flower always exists somewhere ahead of us. Just beyond the next bend. We can't ever possess it, but we continue to follow it.

Ultimately we cannot keep everything. Children grow up, friends leave, parents die. Everything comes to an end. Except meaning. That's the lesson hidden inside the ending of Sparkle Valley.

Meaning survives change. The end of the chapter doesn't erase what came before it. At the very end of the epilogue, Emily is standing by Grandma Doris's bed with her parents. They're holding her close and she's crying. But she's smiling too. That's because she received a gift that she almost missed. A chance to say goodbye. And maybe that's Grandma Doris's final lesson. Everything changes.

The butterflies fly away. People that we love leave us, but their meaning (and love) remains.

And the Blue Flower keeps calling us forward.

And this is where the courage comes in. At the end, Emily and Abigail keep walking toward the horizon with gratitude for what was, but also with an openness to what comes next. And that's why the final chapter has the only title it ever could: Hello and Goodbye..